pivotallabs.com Archives - 09 September 2013, Monday

It depends: why are you asking for those things? If you’re interested in properties of the business (say, you’re in businesses/show.html.haml), and one of those properties is the name of the business owner, you’d want to ask the business for it’s owner name. The business is responsibl...

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One of the exciting things in Cloud Foundry is the possibility to connect your app to different services. The interesting aspect about services is actually not the service itself. That can just be a regular CF app that provides some functionality, e.g., an app that takes photos, resiz...

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Who We Are We’ve been at the forefront of agile development for more than two decades building highly reliable, scalable software for innovative industry leaders and emerging companies across a number of industries. What We Do We serve a range of clients from seed stage startups to Fo...

If you are a developer testing web accessibility using OS X’s VoiceOver screen reader, you can follow this guide to limit announcements to a specific application and URL, so that VoiceOver only announces your application content and does not interrupt your development workflow. VoiceO...

Dan Podsedly manages Pivotal Tracker, Pivotal Labs’ award winning project management and collaboration software. Dan has been building large applications since the Smalltalk era, and has been a practitioner and coach of agile programming methods since the earliest days of Extreme Prog...

Hungry for the opportunity share your ideas in an open environment and be inspired by the creativity of others? The Pivotal Tracker engineering team at Pivotal Labs is a collaborative group where ideas for product improvements and contributions aren’t just welcomed but expected. Track...

RubyMine’s powerful “Go to file” command allows you to quickly jump to a particular file in a project. This is a great way to get started, but a development session often ends up being confined to a small set of files and directories. It’s inefficient to constantly search project-wide...

Many people new to building apps fall in love the moment they learn about the idea of a Minimum Viable Product. “It’s minimal! So there’s less risk. And it’s viable! So it’ll prove something!”. Unfortunately, it’s easy for the line of “minimum” or “viable” to slip. How can a team stay...

Yesterday I found another reason to love working with MDPress for creating presentations. MDPress is an open source tool that generates HTML presentations from Markdown content. It’s great for someone who works on the command line all day, and who enjoys the conveniences of version co...

Dan Podsedly manages Pivotal Tracker, Pivotal Labs’ award winning project management and collaboration software. Dan has been building large applications since the Smalltalk era, and has been a practitioner and coach of agile programming methods since the earliest days of Extreme Prog...

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Design at Pivotal Labs has a lot to do with collaboration with in-house teams and local communities. Pivotal Labs took the opportunity to help host the San Francisco Product Design Guild last Saturday. The Product Design Guild is an event that reaches out to local Designers to come an...

San Francisco Events August Events August 1st - 31st, 2013 Tuesday August 13 eXtreme Tuesday Club An SF meeting each week to talk about eXtreme Programming, Test Driven Development and all sorts of geeky stuff. http://www.meetup.com/pivotal-labs-sf/events/132945852/ Tuesday August 20 ...

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Triaging Accessibility Issues with Cameron Cundiff Tuesday, August 13, 2013 Cameron Cundiff discusses accessibility issues, how to triage them and how to fix them. Slides are also available . Watch live streaming video from pivotallabs at livestream.com Video starts at 6:40 0 Shares S...

During our migration to Rails 4 we heavily relied on our test suite. We experienced some unexpected behavior when running integration specs. There were multiple issues such as brittle tests and hanging tests. The main reason for all of these issues was the capybara-webkit gem. For the...

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The subject of today’s post is inspired by moving (which I’m doing tomorrow). I’ve talked in the past about the theme of not putting features into your product unless they are absolutely critical. An extension of that is to observe your product in the wild and evaluate where you went ...

So, you’ve launched your MVP… congratulations! That’s a huge achievement, but don’t kid yourself – your v1 product is almost certainly not ready to scale into a real business. MVPs are, by definition, the minimal feature set you need to start learning with real users, and the speed at...

There are a number of different tools to implement search– there are dedicated fulltext datastores such as ElasticSearch and Apache Solr, plus conventional relational databases like PostgreSQL that have fulltext search support built-in. Of these, Solr is one of the more established op...

UPDATE: Thanks to fellow Pivots Alex Kwiatkowski and Rick Reilly, we found that inheriting from ActionController::Parameters didn’t work for update_attribtues . Alex explains some of the changes they made . In the mean time, check out my repo for the example, including a commit for th...

Welcome back to our semi-regularly scheduled program. This time around, we are going to take a look at how to write tests in Go, specifically those for http.Handler endpoints. If you are a Rails programmer, think of these handler endpoints as controller actions. Background Testing is ...

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This is the first post in a series of blog articles that will teach you Cedar. The posts will walk you through test driven iPhone development to create a simple cooking app to save all your favorite recipes. You can download the completed code with Git commits for each major milestone...

I have been asked by at least a few people if I could tell them the best way to get started with programming and I have been slightly ashamed that I was unable to confidently answer that question. I got started in a way that was certainly not the most efficient one, and it really bugs...

In a typical Rails app, one ActiveRecord model tends to accumulate a lot of associations and related methods. This is usually the User class; e.g., the User has many posts, comments, contacts, projects, etc. It’s also common to have a few instance methods to filter these associations,...

Once upon a time, there was a client who struggled with the Agile process. It’s not that he wasn’t smart and curious, and it’s not that he didn’t want to build a great product in a domain he knew lots about, but he had a thorny problem: because he was successful, and because he was sm...

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Imagine if someone flipped a switch on your project that broke your entire integration test suite with failures that surfaced critical, long standing bugs in production that render your site useless to many thousands of users. Hundreds of failures in CI, up on a monitor for everyone t...

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The formulation represents the power of Ruby and the expressiveness of Rails. All seems fine and well. That is, until the code is executed. Suddenly, our snappy application grounds to a halt and our server log spits out a single warning over and over creating a wall of text, as if we ...

I had no clue how we were going to afford Branford Marsalis. I’m not sure who was the instigator, but there was consensus. The Contemporary Concerts team wanted Athens, Georgia, home to an R.E.M.- and/or NCAA- Division-I-football-crazed University of Georgia campus, to host the Sting ...

Although many think of Pivotal Labs as a Rails consulting firm, our broadening client base regularly comes to us with different technical stacks. Among these, Python and Django lead the pack. When Pivotal Labs begins work into any new environment, we need a base level of tooling to be...

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might be the biggest win in choosing Markdown as a default. There’s little need to pick a new structure every time you take notes. Another big benefit of Markdown is that it works in plaintext, which means its future proof. When Microsoft Word Home Office Supreme 2016 breaks all your ...

Last year, an article was making the rounds proclaiming : If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it Having been continually assaulted by shouting tutorials I was firmly in this camp. It makes sense at face value, since this is should be a good litmus test for simplicity and conveying ...

Rails 4 becomes much more opinionated about the Rails Asset Pipeline, and turns on fingerprinting for assets by default. Rather than fight the default, we copied the default asset-related settings into our application. In verifying our caching configuration, we noticed that our browse...